AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE OVERVIEW; U.S. Says Raids Worked and May Stall Terror Attacks

The Administration made measured claims of success today for the cruise-missile attacks in the Sudan and Afghanistan on Thursday. Officials said the attack on a mountain redoubt in Afghanistan would disrupt training and, possibly, future attacks by terrorists sponsored by Osama bin Laden.

Cloudy weather and haze obscured satellite photographs of what the Administration has described as a sprawling terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. The weather hampered efforts to learn the extent of the damage done when missiles fired from four Navy warships and one submarine pummeled the area.

But senior Administration officials said preliminary assessments, based in part on sources other than spy satellites, indicated that the missiles destroyed or damaged many buildings in the complex about 90 miles south of Kabul.

Supporters of Mr. bin Laden sought to play down the damage but spoke of 20 or more deaths and dozens more wounded. They said the Saudi-born millionaire was still alive and ready to retaliate.

But Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said the strike was ''successful in the sense that we destroyed a number of facilities'' at the camp, known as Zhawar Kili Al-Badr. At the White House, President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, said, ''The attacks have significantly disrupted the capability to use these camps as terrorist training facilities.''

Administration officials, while circumspect in their choice of words, left open the possibility that the United States would strike Mr. bin Laden's network again. At the same time, the Administration opened a new front in its fight against the man accused of sponsoring terrorist attacks, including the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks ago.

President Clinton signed an executive order that placed Mr. bin Laden on the Treasury Department's list of terrorists and their sponsors, clearing the way for officials to seize his assets. It was not immediately clear, however, whether he has any assets in the United States. It was also unclear why he had not been put on the list earlier.

A NATO diplomat said today that the Administration had begun asking allies in Europe to help in freezing the assets of Mr. bin Laden and groups associated with him.

A man claiming to be a spokesman for Mr. bin Laden told the editor of an Arabic newspaper in London, al-Quds al-Arabi, that Mr. bin Laden had survived the missile strikes and was vowing to avenge them with attacks on American targets.

''The battle has not yet started,'' the editor, Abdel-Bari Atwan, quoted the spokesman as saying.

Before leaving Washington to return to his vacation in Martha's Vineyard tonight, Mr. Clinton met with his national security advisers and telephoned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan.

Mr. Clinton's senior aides also sought to rally support for the attacks on Capitol Hill, where some critics on Thursday had questioned the strikes, or at least their timing, given the furor over Mr. Clinton's admission on Monday night that he had had an intimate relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Mr. Cohen, joined by Gen. Henry Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met for a classified briefing with lawmakers this afternoon. The lawmakers emerged sounding persuaded by what some called ''irrefutable evidence'' from satellite photographs, intercepts of telephone conversations and statements by a suspect in the embassy bombings.

''What they shared with us made it crystal clear that terrorism had escalated against us,'' Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, said in a telephone interview.

Other lawmakers said they found persuasive the information gleaned from the suspect who has begun to cooperate with the authorities, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh. When he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities on Aug. 7, the day of the embassy bombings, he said he was a follower of Mr. bin Laden's. Mr. Odeh also told them he had helped to build the Nairobi bomb, officials said.

But Clinton Administration officials declined to make public the specific evidence that led to the swift and surprising attacks on Thursday.

In the wake of the strikes, which involved roughly 75 cruise missiles fired from undisclosed positions in the Arabian and Red Seas, the Administration warned that retaliatory attacks against American targets were a grave possibility. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reiterated a security alert first issued in the hours after Thursday's strikes, and public buildings, airports and military bases in the United States and abroad beefed up security.

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Despite the risks, the Administration defended the strikes, citing the nation's right, as defined in the United Nations Charter, to defend itself. Mr. Berger said the Administration considered the camp outside the remote Afghan town of Khost ''to be a military target.''

At the State Department, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas R. Pickering, declared that the United States could not sit idly.

''We could not simply batten down the hatches and wait for the next attack to hit us,'' he said. ''We had to act decisively. We do not expect that these strikes will in themselves end the threat, but they are important because they clearly show that we are in this for the long haul.''

Abroad, the strikes generated official denunciations and street protests in the Sudan and Afghanistan. There were also angry demonstrations in Pakistan. In the Afghan capital, Kabul, protesters converged on the American Embassy. In Kabul, two United Nations workers were shot in separate attacks that appeared to be related to anger over the American strikes.

The Pentagon's reticence to confirm publicly even the most fundamental details of the strikes -- including the names of the Navy ships involved or even the exact number of missiles fired -- compounded the uncertainty that prevailed today, as did Mr. Cohen's vague assertions that additional American attacks could be in the offing. The poor weather in Afghanistan also disappointed officials in Washington who hoped to learn how effective the strikes had been.

The strike in the Sudan seemed to have accomplished its mission. Stark television images confirmed that the strike heavily damaged a factory that officials described as a manufacturer of building blocks for chemical weapons. Mr. Berger declared it ''functionally destroyed.''

Sudan's state-run television said 10 people had been injured, but none, evidently, were killed. The President of the Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was quoted by Reuters as saying the factory, Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Company, was a benign commercial venture that produced half the nation's medicines.

The Sudanese Government today wrote to the president of the United Nations Security Council requesting an urgent meeting to discuss the attack against the factory, which Washington says was making precursors for chemical weapons.

Earlier Sudan's United Nations representative, Elfatih Erwa, said he would ask the Council to send a fact-finding mission to Khartoum to confirm the Sudan's assertion that the plant was a genuine pharmaceutical factory and had no links to Mr. bin Laden. In protest, the Sudan recalled its diplomats from Washington.

The success of the strike in Afghanistan was less clear. In Kabul, the Taliban faction that rules the country announced that 21 people had died in the attack on the base, while 30 others were injured, but the spokesman for Mr. bin Laden put the dead at 28 in his remarks to the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi. He said the dead included six Arab militants, 15 Pakistanis and seven Afghans.

In Washington, officials said they had no way of knowing who died, and the Pentagon received conflicting, unverifiable intelligence reports. Some said Mr. bin Laden was dead; others said he was alive, a senior Administration official said.

The United States timed the attack to what they believed to be a gathering of terrorists at the camp, but Mr. Cohen said it was not clear that the assembly had taken place.

With only one chance a day for spy satellites to photograph the area, a full assessment will take at least another day. There were early indications that while some missiles hit their targets, others missed entirely.

''Some of the facilities have been destroyed completely,'' a senior Pentagon official said. ''Some have been damaged heavily. Some have been damaged lightly. And some have been missed entirely.''